Quotes About Writers And Critics

#1. Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin And there's no tellin' who That it's namin' For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin'.

Bob Dylan

#2. His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

Terry Pratchett

#3. At some point, you have to accept that your life as you knew it is completely over. And now you need to make the most out of your new one.

H.T. Night

#4. If something good was happening in my life, I'd call my mom to let her know. If something bad was happening, she'd be somebody whose advice I would seek out. We had a very good relationship, but she drove me crazy, all the time. But, she drove me crazy in a loving way.

Dan Fogelman

#5. Writing is hard ... It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it's no longer a hobby, it's no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows.

Karina Halle

#6. In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them ... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again.

Helen Vendler

#7. In the womb, humans are free of microbes. Colonization begins during the journey down the birth canal, which is riddled with bacteria, some of which make their way onto the newborn's skin.

Robin Marantz Henig

#8. The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.

Edward Abbey

#9. Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?

Paulo Coelho

#10. The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.

R.M. Engelhardt

#11. There's a longstanding tradition that journalists don't cheer in the press box. They have opinions, like anyone else, but they are expected to keep those opinions out of their work.

Bill Dedman

#12. You are God's image.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#13. The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

William Faulkner

#14. All that really matters to me is that there are critics.

Peter Davis

#15. I know too many playwrights, or would-be playwrights, or would-have-been playwrights, that are around my age, who were bitter or have gone to something else because they got such a raw deal from critics, and some are quite wonderful writers.

Jennifer Tipton

#16. As the 'critic of color,' I'm frequently asked to review Indian and Pakistani writers.

Parul Sehgal

#17. Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Isabel Allende

#18. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.

Chuck Klosterman

#19. I'm not interested in the reviews by critics over the age of 15.

Mark A. Cooper

#20. Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.

Henry Louis Gates

#21. I think we have always had a fascination for gangs and gangsters, and I think we always will.

Ross Kemp

#22. Remember and think about the closeness of the Creator. If you live in this wisdom, it will give you endless strength and hope.

Frank Fools Crow

#23. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.

Edward Abbey

#24. If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?

Douglas Coupland

#25. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.

Anthony Burgess

#26. I lack the World, for I move like a Ghost through it.

Peter Ackroyd

#27. Art has a noble task: to educate man. That's why the writer's part in our society is a most responsible one. The writers are the architects of human souls and the critics are the architects of the writer's souls.

Slawomir Mrozek

#28. It would not be fair to the critics of Rotary, who include some of the most brilliant of the British and American writers, to charge them with prejudice.

Paul Harris

#29. Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.

Kate Braverman

#30. To these things do writers sink; and then the critics tell them that they "talk for effect"; and then the writers answer: "What the devil else should we talk for? Ineffectualness?

G.K. Chesterton

#31. To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

Steven Heighton

#32. demands the utmost in wisdom, in attack, in endurance. Violence is simple and easy, it is the sword of the stupid and dull-witted, and it always leaves chaos. To carry on a positive revolution without violence - ah, that is a challenge to intelligence!

Pearl S. Buck

#33. Why blame the dark for being dark? It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn't as bright as it could be.

Rob Bell

#34. I don't generally publicly respond to
reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers' responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.

China Mieville

#35. A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

Howard Fast

#36. All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.

Carla H. Krueger

#37. Obviously all writers, all artists, have their own internal critics; as they write they are being self-critical.

Edna Longley

#38. (For the uninitiated, "ectoplasm" is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins's writings on religion.)

Edward Feser

#39. I'm going to tell it straight, that yes, I'd love to be traded

Terry Bradshaw

#40. Unfortunately life has a way of sidetracking one's greatest ambitions. Painters, would-be artists, end up whitewashing walls. Sculptors are forced to design toilets. Writers become critics or publicists. Archaeologists, like myself, can become gravediggers.

Salman Rushdie

#41. The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Nassim Nicholas Taleb